That the BMW is the car that inspired this whole silly investigation did not help it one bit in the test. Its system is the most poorly realized of the three. Supplied by Autoliv, the same company that makes Audi’s night-vision hardware, the 750i’s arrangement is pretty basic goods. A thermographic camera is tucked into the grille. It displays its soft, dark image on the nav screen.

In real-world driving, this display location is less than ideal. Audi and Mercedes use screens in the gauge cluster, closer to the driver’s line of sight. Oddly, the off-center location proved a boon in the autocross test because the steering wheel never blocked the image. And since we weren’t able to see out of the front of the vehicle, we had our eyes glued to the screen anyway. So, if you’re planning to do a lot of nighttime autocross events, with your windows covered, look no further. Keep in mind that this does not mean the BMW won; it just didn’t lose. We stayed on the course only long enough to encounter the deer, for which we stopped in time. But it was in the 750i that we became most disoriented and ended up finishing the course through the starting gate, with at least two now-useless cones crammed under the front of the car.

The BMW was the winner of the proximity test. We stopped just shy of two feet from the deer’s flank, the shortest distance of the group. But we consider the BMW to be the best of three losers because, to achieve that result, we basically kept driving until the deer all but disappeared from the screen. We think we might have been looking beneath the deer. But, a win is a win, even if it illustrates a lack of capability that the automaker did not claim to provide. The camera’s relatively low mounting position means that if you try to use it in day-to-day driving, you’d stop well short of the car in front of you because it would appear, on final approach, as if you were already under its bumper.

The 750i’s $2600 system earned its last-place finish due to its weak pedestrian-detection capability. All three of these systems use recognition software that, like most current point-and-shoot digital cameras, can recognize certain shapes and graphically highlight them on the screen. Digital cameras are designed to recognize human faces. The night-vision software is designed to recognize and highlight standing human forms (so don’t go sitting on a dark road at night). If there is a legitimate use for all this camera gear (aside from being another step on the road to an automated car), pedestrian detection is it. Also, it turns out that BMW hates guys who ride recumbent bicycles. The car’s instruction manual notes that “cyclists on unconventional bicycles” are less likely to be recognized. And, thwarting our plan to outfit road warrior Zeb in a crash helmet modified with deer antlers, the system’s effectiveness is compromised if a pedestrian’s head is covered.

Okay, killjoy BMW, but here’s the problem: The pedestrian-detection system is supposed to color a detected human a “slight yellow hue.” It is so slight, however, that you would have to stop to take a good look at the image to detect the yellow at all. We therefore could not get an accurate read since we weren’t sure the system was working. Further, the image displayed on the screen is not as clear as the others. We noticed a vaguely Zeb-shaped blob from about 300 feet away, but we don’t want to see a Zeb; we want to see the Zeb.

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